In Chile's Atacama, world's driest desert, growing lettuces with fog

CHANARAL, Chile (Reuters) -In Chile's arid Atacama, the driest desert in the world, growers and researchers are looking to harness water from the very air itself to grow lettuces and lemons, using a net to catch drops of moisture from fog.

"We are growing hydroponic lettuce entirely with fog water in the driest desert on the planet," Orlando Rojas, president of the Atacama Fog Catchers Association, told Reuters near Chanaral in the Atacama, where some areas do not see rainfall for years.

"We have had other crops that have not yielded results, which is why we have tended towards doing lettuce."

Researchers at the UC Atacama Desert Center are launching an open-access web mapping platform to show the location of the areas with potential for fog-water harvesting in the country, trying to open up these arid areas for cultivation.

"We know its potential and we know it can be an option and a solution for different scales of water needs in different territories where there is significant water scarcity," said Camilo Del Rio, director of the UC Atacama Desert Center.

Amid barren rocky hills and dry, white sand, the system works by using a mesh suspended between two poles that intercepts the small amount of moisture in the air, turning it into droplets that are collected and stored in water tanks.

"We are able to collect 1,000 to 1,400 liters of water in these inhospitable places, where we are clearly not favored by nature in other ways," said Rojas in a region where lemon trees were also growing from the collected water.

"We have the potential for life, which is this water resource. Once we learned about this project, we haven't stopped because it is vital for human subsistence."

Mario Segovia, also from the fog-catching group, said that the water collected from moisture in the air was pure.

"The harvest doesn't look bad, it's a super healthy food, pure nutrients that are organic," he said. "They're in a state of water with nutrients, because this fog-catcher water is completely neutral, it has no minerals, no chlorine, nothing."

(Reporting by Rodrigo Gutierrez; Writing by Adam Jourdan; Editing by Nia Williams)

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